Do (strict) Chinese mums know best?

Amy Chua claims that soft western parenting fails because it stops children from fulfilling their potential, whereas her hardline Chinese approach gets results. Journalist Toby Young and psychologist Oliver James have their say

Toby Young, journalist and campaigner for 'free schools': The problem with western parents, Amy Chua says, is that we assume our children are fragile, delicate creatures. We think they'll be permanently damaged if we push them too hard or express our disappointment if they're under-achieving. Chinese mothers, by contrast, will chastise and ridicule their children, confident that they're strong enough to take it. "Chinese parents demand perfect grades because they believe that their child can get them," she writes. "If their child doesn't get them, the Chinese parent assumes it's because the child didn't work hard enough. That's why the solution to substandard performance is always to excoriate, punish and shame the child."

A lot of this is exaggerated, of course, and I'm sure many Chinese mothers will resent being stereotyped in this way. But I like Chua's lack of ambivalence about her own values. She knows her own achievements are based on back-breaking labour – she's a professor of law at Yale – and wants her daughters to be as successful as her. She doesn't have any truck with the trendy notion that children should be allowed to flower in their own way. Her daughters aren't allowed on sleepovers, they've never watched TV or played computer games and they've never appeared in school plays. And, yes, they always get As. Apart from in drama and PE, which don't count.

She claims that Chinese children make for more robust adults, having been galvanised in the hot-house of the Chinese parenting academy. The problem with constantly boosting our children's self-esteem, telling them they're budding little geniuses when they manage to add 2 + 2, is that we're setting them up for a fall. We send them out into the world with an inflated idea of their own abilities and the moment they come face to face with a tough competitor – one of Ms Chua's daughters, for instance – they collapse like a house of cards. Bye-bye, self-esteem. Hello, depression.

This sounds like a good reason to be a bit tougher on our children, but is it? You're the psychologist, you tell me.

Oliver James, psychologist and author: Chua is right that the great majority of exceptional achievement in many domains is the product of hothousing, not in our genes. Whether it be the Williams sisters, Michael Jackson (who, along with his brothers, was whipped by his father if he did not come straight home from school and practise singing and dancing until bedtime for every day of his childhood) or Tiger Woods, such stars' parents hijacked them as vehicles for their own ambitions by coercing them to focus on a particular skill to the exclusion of any other gratifications from a very young age. While the vast majority of prodigies do not go on to be exceptional adults, it's true hothousing is the main cause of exceptional skills in most fields. For instance, studies of musicians show that from childhood onwards, compared with "mere" orchestral players, soloists practised for more hours, under more pressure to do so, from earlier ages.

The evidence also shows that indiscriminately positive praise for children, as opposed to praise for specific efforts, leads to bloated, unreal self-esteem and is one of the reasons for the epidemic of narcissism now afflicting the USA.

However, there is also very robust evidence that offspring of perfectionist, over-controlling parents whose love is conditional on performance do worse than ones whose parents love them for "who they are".

It's not just that such children are at much greater risk of depression, anxiety, eating disorders and substance abuse. Overall, paradoxically, they actually do worse academically.

Presumably we agree that we both want mentally healthy offspring who have the skills to do well in fields they enjoy. How do you propose to achieve that with your children by bullying and abusing them? Would you like to have been Jackson's or Woods's father?

Toby: You appear to be confusing Amy Chua with Michael Jackson's dad. I don't get the impression that she's a "perfectionist, over-controlling" parent "whose love is conditional" on her children's "performance". Just a typical Chinese mum. Indeed, you point out that children of such parents tend not to do well academically, whereas Amy's children are straight-A students so, by your own account she can't be guilty of Jacksonian overbearance. Similarly, Chinese children on average do better academically than their British and American counterparts, so it can't be that the Chinese method of parenting is counter-productive in the way you highlight.

More generally, is there any evidence that Chinese children are at a "greater risk of depression, anxiety, eating disorders and substance abuse" than western children? A lot of our ideas about parenting are informed by a general desire to minimise the risk of mental disorders – we want our children to be happy – but most of us haven't bothered to make a thorough, evidence-based assessment of different parenting philosophies. You appear to be saying that a tougher, more proscriptive approach to parenting, like the one Chua is recommending, will produce children more prone to unhappiness. But is this based on a robust body of evidence? Can you refer me to the relevant peer-reviewed research?

Oliver: Healthy success in children results from self-motivation (see selfdeterminationtheory.org for scientific papers). Children who are coerced by parents end up "introjecting" their values – mechanically adopting them without understanding, out of fear and obedience, making them like hypnotised subjects who feel they have no volition.

By contrast, if parents are loving, supportive and encouraging, the child "identifies" with parental values makes them their own, metabolises and owns them. These are the children who do best in every way, are cheerful and do well in the subjects that interest them, rather than grade-chasing zombies.

Lack of creativity is a major problem as a result of Asian schooling. During visits to seven nations in 2004, in each one I played a simple game with a group of 15-year-olds. They had to picture what it would be like to have the average wage, then double it, then how they would feel six months later. Then it was doubled again and so on.

The Chinese children never got past the first stage: "But why would you pay me twice as much for doing the same?", "That would never happen" and so on. They were simply incapable of picturing an abstract situation and of entering into a game. I am sure this was because their creativity had been systematically destroyed and in its place, a survival pragmatism installed.

On the other hand, the Chinese suffer very low rates of depression. One reason is that their parents do not actually act as Chua claims. Yes, the child is excoriated for failing the family and its clan, if it does badly. But the parents and grandparents still show a great deal of love and warmth to the child, even if it has failed or done wrong. That it is a shame rather than guilt culture seems to reduce against self-attacking depressive thoughts.

In the end, just imagine what a crazy world it would be if everyone followed Chua's advice: a skills arms race, in which you would have to be unbelievably motivated and ruthless to get anywhere. Only psychopaths would succeed!